Manufacturing processes are highly automated and may be divided into several hierarchical layers. For example, at the highest level, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) takes place, which may be referred to as a business layer. At lower levels, the hardware implementation and control take place, which may be referred to as various control or unit layer. An intermediate layer integrates and connects business and control layers. This intermediate layer includes a manufacturing execution system (MES) that defines an MES process in terms of data and interactions between functions, such as resource management, resource allocation, dispatching, data collection and acquisition, quality assurance management, maintenance management, performance analysis, scheduling, document control, labor management and material and production tracking.
The interaction between humans and machines during the manufacturing process is done through interfaces referred to as Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs). The HMI is the single entry point to the machine world for machine operators; it provides humans the status information about the machines such as position, velocity, temperature, etc. Using this information, the human provides commands to the machines to modify their behavior; for example, for them to stop, to move, to mill, to drill, etc.
HMI technology is human-centric, built for humans to understand machines. Thus, HMI typically focuses on techniques receiving information from machines and presenting in a manner that allows a human to quickly review and respond accordingly. However, aside from this presentation, the automation system largely ignores the important roles of humans in the automation environment. This exposes a deficiency in the system because the safety, quality and efficiency overall automation system is highly dependent on how humans interact it.
The separation between humans and machines in the automation environment has traditionally made sense because each machine produces data which may be captured and analyzed to ascertain the machine's state. Moreover, protocols and translation mechanisms exists for allowing efficient machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Human communications, on the other hand, tend to be less data-centric and (outside of the HMI) the machines operate largely unaware of the presence of any humans in the automation environment. At the same time, the day-to-day activities of humans generate a great deal data (e.g., body measurements acquired by physical sensor, location data, email and text messages, etc.).
Accordingly, it is desired to leverage the available data generated by humans to integrate humans into the automation environment in a manner that enhances machine-to-human communications beyond the capabilities currently available in HMI technology.